The Bone Orchard

by Paul Doiron

  “She’s still new at the job. You should cut her some slack.”

  “The problem is, the poachers aren’t afraid of her. People around here knew you’d catch them if they went out night hunting. And so they went up-country or wherever to jack their deer.”

  It was actually news to me that I’d been considered something of a badass. But I was glad Pulkinnen, at least, had a favorable opinion of me. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Can’t you make some calls to Augusta and tell them we need a better warden? Maybe you could get yourself transferred back here.”

  “You should give Warden Tate a chance. Sometimes it takes a while to make a case the DA can take to court.”

  He ran his tongue along the broom bottom of his mustache. “She won’t be around much longer anyway. Not after what happened over in Camden. I heard the dead guy’s father is a politically connected lawyer. He’s going to sue everyone involved.”

  Pulkinnen’s characterization of James Gammon Sr. was in line with my own experience of the man. Even if the attorney general cleared the wardens of wrongdoing, there were ways for a vengeful attorney to inflict pain on Kathy Frost and Danielle Tate. He could hire investigators to drag skeletons out of the women’s closets, spread malicious rumors about them to his friends who ran media companies, make phone calls to bureaucrats in Augusta with the authority to derail their careers. He could do all these things and still bring a wrongful-death suit.

  Ever since I’d decided to visit the prison, I’d flirted with the idea of driving out to Kathy’s house. I needed to speak with her for my own peace of mind, and I suspected that, despite the text she’d sent me, she might appreciate having someone to confide in who’d been through an investigation involving use of force recently.

  Sitting at the diner, listening to Pulkinnen’s dire prophecies, I decided to stop waiting for an invitation.

  * * *

  The rain let up while I was on the road. I didn’t realize it at first because there was so much standing water. The tires of the car in front of me kept splashing my windshield, forcing me to use my wipers.

  Kathy lived on Appleton Ridge, in a drafty old farmhouse that looked down a hillside at a field of blueberries. At the top of the ridge was a grove of red pines. On the other side of it was an orchard where deer came at dawn and dusk to eat the fallen apples the pickers had left behind after the harvest. Kathy called it “the bone orchard” because there was a family cemetery hidden among the roots of the trees. The mossy gravestones were so weathered, you could no longer read the names of the dead.

  I turned off the rural road and onto the long driveway that led to her front door. I drove past a row of elm trees shaped like umbrellas, slowing as I approached the house, until I saw there was a dim light in the window, and I knew that Kathy was home. Her teal-colored patrol truck was parked beside her personal vehicle, a Nissan Xterra SUV. The dooryard was crowded with a game warden’s many modes of transportation: two canoes, a sea kayak, a motorboat on its trailer, a snowmobile waiting out the warm weather beneath a tarp, and a still-shiny all-terrain vehicle that had replaced the machine one of her wardens had crashed. None of these things belonged to Kathy. If she lost her job, they would all go to the sergeant who replaced her.

  A dog began to bay inside the house as I came to a stop beside her truck. Kathy was the head of the division K-9 team. Most of the wardens who worked with dogs used German shepherds or Labs, but Kathy’s longtime companion was a black-and-tan coonhound named Pluto. At age twelve, he was more gray and tan than black and tan, but Kathy occasionally brought him out of retirement to search for a missing child. Pluto’s nose was legendary in the annals of the Maine Warden Service. His specialty was finding the dead, not the living; Kathy had taken him to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to search for cadavers, and the experience had left her profoundly shaken. She often talked to me about finding another puppy to train, but she never seemed to get around to it. I doubted she would buy another dog until Pluto passed away.

  Even before I could climb out of the Bronco, the front door opened and Pluto came waddling down the steps on his bad hips, yowling at the intruder. Kathy remained in the doorway. I could see her lanky outline but not much more than that.

  We used to have a ritual that if either of us showed up at the other’s house, the visitor was required to bring coffee. I’d forgotten all about the tradition until now. There were so many things from those days that had slipped my memory.

  “Hey,” I said.

  The question of how she would receive my visit got a quick answer. “What are you supposed to be? The prodigal son?”

  “I was in the neighborhood.”

  “Right.”

  I bent down to scratch Pluto’s head between his heavy-hanging ears, but the dog kept on baying. “Actually, I was visiting a friend at the prison.”

  “Now, that I can believe. Nice beard, by the way.”

  I straightened up and took a step toward the open door. “Aren’t you going to invite me inside?”

  “Isn’t that what vampires say?” She stepped onto the stoop and closed the door behind her. In the failing light, her face looked ashen, and she was dressed in dark colors—black jeans and a black fleece vest over a gray turtleneck—which seemed in keeping with a person in mourning. Her posture was stiff. Her hands were balled into fists. I’d forgotten how tall she was. “Why are you here, Mike?”

  “I was hoping we could talk.”

  “About you or about me?”

  “Both.”

  “No offense, but I don’t think we have that kind of relationship anymore.”

  “I felt I owed you that after my mom died. You helped me get through it.”

  The muscles along her mouth relaxed and she closed her eyes. “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it. I thought you might want to tell me what happened at the Gammons’.”

  “You know I am not allowed to do that.”

  “I’m not afraid of being called to give a deposition if it goes to a civil trial.”

  She ran a hand through her bobbed hair. “Did you read the interview with the Gammons in the paper today?”

  “I was on the road.”

  “If I’d known the kid was the son of one of the most powerful lawyers in the country, I would have let him blow his own brains out.”

  Kathy had a sarcastic side, but I knew she wasn’t a coldhearted person. “You don’t mean that.”

  “All right,” she said. “I would have let the Camden cops take the call.”

  “You don’t mean that, either.”

  She folded her arms under her breasts. “Why is it you think you know what I mean?”

  “Because I know you, Kathy. You wouldn’t have shot Jimmy Gammon unless you were certain that he was going to fire his gun at you or Tate.”

  “Maybe I screwed up,” she said. “Have you thought of that? It was pretty dark in that barn.”

  “You wouldn’t have screwed up. You’re too good an officer.”

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

  “I know something about use-of-force investigations. I’ve been through two of them.”

  “Now we’re even.”

  I’d forgotten that Kathy had shot a man when she was my age. It had happened in her first district, way up north amid the potato and broccoli fields of Aroostook County, where she’d grown up. She’d confided only a few of the details to me, but I knew it had been a domestic violence call. A three-hundred-pound brute named Jacques Decoster had been beating his wife with the metal end of his belt while their son looked on in horror. Decoster had come after Kathy with a butcher’s knife before she unloaded a .357 slug in his chest. The review board had ruled that the shooting was justified.

  “The AG is going to clear you,” I said.

  “If you think that’s what’s bothering me, you should send your psychologist’s license back to the dime store,” she said. “Gammon survived a t
our in Afghanistan. But instead of getting killed by the fucking Taliban, it ends up being me who shoots him.”

  “He wanted to die.”

  “Oh, really? You’re one hundred percent sure of that?”

  “I knew him, Kathy. I’ve been to his house.”

  She bit her lip, and I sensed that this came as news to her. I had never had reason to mention Jimmy Gammon to my former sergeant before.

  “Did you see what they did to his face over there? His skin looked like it had melted.”

  “I knew him from before he went to war. I didn’t even know that he had been wounded.”

  “Then you don’t know shit, Mike.”

  “I know you shouldn’t blame yourself for his actions. If he wanted to end his life, he should have done it himself. No matter how fucked-up he was, he had no right to put you in that position.”

  “We’re not suppose to stand by and let people commit suicide,” she said. “Oh, that’s right. You’ve absolved yourself of those responsibilities.”

  “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You’re pissed at me for resigning?”

  Her face darkened with blood. “Of course I am! Do you know what I went through to keep you from being fired? Not just once but constantly for three years?”

  “I have some sense of it.”

  “I don’t think you do,” she said. “Both Major Malcomb and I made promises to the colonel that you were worth saving. We went on bended knee to the commissioner when he was looking for ways to have you shitcanned. We said, ‘Bowditch doesn’t always make the best decisions, but the kid has the heart of a lion. You wait and see. He might seem like a fuckup now, but someday he’s going to become a legendary warden.’”

  I knew that they had often argued with the brass on my behalf, but I hadn’t realized what a fight it had been.

  “I didn’t ask you to do that,” I said.

  “You forced us to put our own reputations on the line. And then you went and quit. The colonel and the commissioner said to us, ‘We knew this guy couldn’t hack it.’ You made us look like fools, Mike.”

  “Would it help if I said I was sorry?”

  “What would help is explaining why you screwed me over like that. I was pulling strings to get you transferred back to Division B. The next thing I know, you’re calling to tell me you’re quitting.”

  “I didn’t quit. I resigned.”

  “Call it what you want. The fact remains it was a cowardly thing to do.”

  “It wasn’t cowardly,” I said. “It was just the opposite.”

  “Keep telling yourself that.” She brought two fingers to her mouth and whistled sharply.

  Pluto spun around and trotted back to her. She turned her broad back to me and climbed the stairs to the door and opened it without ever looking in my direction.

  “That’s it, then?” I called after her.

  She paused without facing me and said, “Do you know who you look like with the beard and the long hair? Your old man. I’m sure he would be proud.”

  She stepped inside the house and closed the door.

  13

  Kathy’s parting shot about my looking like my father hurt as much as she’d intended it to. My father had been a notorious poacher of deer, a wrecker of barrooms, and a seducer of other men’s women. Then, in the last weeks of his life, he’d become something worse. Even before the bitter end, he’d been the kind of violent and self-dealing man I’d pledged never to become.

  It’s just a beard, I wanted to yell at the closed door. But what would be the point?

  Even though we were approaching the longest days of the year, the low-hanging clouds made it seem later than it was. I stood beside the open door of my Bronco, staring at the house and trying to decide if I should knock. But the conversation was going to continue only when—and if—Kathy decided it should continue.

  I climbed behind the wheel and restarted the engine. I reached my right arm across the passenger seat headrest so I could back out of the dooryard without hitting one of Kathy’s sugar maples. Then I headed back to the motel.

  As I passed the dented mailbox at the end of the drive, I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw headlights in the pine grove at the top of the ridge. There was a road that entered the orchard from the other side, and Kathy had told me that she occasionally chased teenagers out of the parking lot after dark. Most of the local kids knew that there were better spots to toke up and get laid than in the backyard of a law-enforcement officer, but word must not have reached the dumbbells in that vehicle. Given the foul mood Kathy was in, I feared for the teens’ safety if she spotted those lights out her bedroom window.

  An invisible mosquito had found its way inside the vehicle when I’d opened the door; I could hear it buzzing around my head. I waved my hand ineffectually in the air and waited for the mosquito to land and draw blood. It used to be that insect bites were just annoyances, the price you paid in Maine for the salt air and blooming lilacs, but that was before the creeping tropics unleashed their pestilences upon us: West Nile virus and eastern equine encephalitis. I knew wardens who’d never used bug dope in their lives—seasoned woodsmen who’d endured thousands of bites over their careers—who now slathered themselves in Deet. These days, you never knew what little thing might get you.

  I’d been on the road for ten minutes when my cell phone vibrated in my pants pocket. Once again I had a momentary illusion that it was my mother calling from the afterlife. I reached into my jeans, trying not to swerve into a telephone pole, and looked at the lighted screen. It was Kathy’s number.

  I pulled over to the side of the road and put the truck into park.

  “I shouldn’t have called you a coward,” she said.

  “It’s all right. I understand.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m not still mad at you. But this has been a pretty crappy week.”

  “The crappiest.”

  “You know I’ve been getting hate mail? Not just the usual anonymous stuff. I’ve gotten signed letters from guys who served in the Guard with Gammon, and from other vets, too. My e-mail address must have gotten posted to some military bulletin board. Do you know what that’s like, having people you admire hate your guts? My own brother Kurt is a Vietnam vet.”

  “It must be hard.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Mike. It was a rhetorical question. I just keep thinking…”

  I waited. “What?”

  “Dani Tate is a good kid. She’s going to make a decent warden when she grows up. I’ve never had a rookie who’s as gung ho about the job as she is.”

  I felt that she was making an unflattering comparison. “What about me?”

  “You thought about everything too much. It wasn’t enough for you just to enforce a fucking rule; you had to second-guess the people who wrote it. Tate does what she’s told. I think she’s memorized every regulation in the book.”

  I had met Dani Tate on only a handful of occasions, and she hadn’t left me with a strong impression, other than that she seemed a lot younger than me despite there being only four years between us in age.

  “How is she doing?” I asked.

  “The union lawyer says we’re not supposed to communicate. They don’t want us getting our stories straight. She’s not the most talkative person in the world anyway. Being in a truck with her on patrol is like being with my dog, conversationally speaking.”

  That had been my experience with Tate as well. When I’d tried to make small talk, I’d gotten a blank stare, which made me think she disapproved of me. At the time, I figured she’d heard about my misadventures and been brainwashed by the higher-ups into seeing me as unworthy to wear the red dress jacket of a Maine warden. Now I wondered if she’d just had nothing to say.

  “The thing is, it should never have happened,” Kathy said.

  “You can’t think that way.”

  “No,” she said. “I mean it wouldn’t have gone down the way it did if you had been there. Not just because you knew Gammon. It
just wouldn’t have happened at all. That’s why I’m so pissed at you right now. I needed you that night, and where the fuck were you?”

  House-sitting for a multimillionaire, studying for a law school exam I’d never take, nursing a bottle of cheap whiskey—none of the answers I had to offer was worth a damn. I was trying to collect a few sentences that didn’t sound pathetic, when somewhere in the background, Pluto let loose with both lungs.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Probably a raccoon outside. Give me a minute, and I’ll call you back.”

  I sat in the Bronco, listening to the engine belts whir while traffic passed in both directions along the country road. A few minutes passed without the phone ringing, and I glanced at my watch. I turned off the engine to save gas. The mosquito made its presence known again around my ears. I decided to give Kathy another two minutes.

  The headlights from the passing cars would light up the inside of the cab for several seconds and then everything would fade again into darkness.

  The cell phone rested in my open hand. I brought up her number from the favorites menu and tapped the button. The phone rang for half a minute and then went to voice mail.

  “Kathy? It’s Mike again. Give me a ring.”

  The mosquito finally landed on my neck. I didn’t feel it at first, then reflexively I brought my hand up fast, dropping the phone to the floor. When I looked at my palm, there was a black stain on my life line that I knew was blood.

  I had seen lights in the orchard above Kathy’s house and had assumed it was just teenagers parking. What if it wasn’t?

  “You know I’ve been getting hate mail?” Kathy had said. “I’ve gotten signed letters from guys who served in the Guard with Gammon, and from other veterans, too.”

  I had to unbuckle my shoulder belt to retrieve the cell phone from where it had landed on the floor mat. I left a message: “I’m headed back your way, Kathy. I’ll be there in ten minutes or so.”

  I buckled myself in and restarted the engine, then pulled an abrupt U-turn in the road in front of a speeding pickup truck. He was going fast, but I was going faster.

  * * *